Portioning your weekly meals into plastic or even BPA-free containers packs some major risks. Among them is weight gain.
If your Sunday nights are dedicated to meal prepping for the week ahead, you’re part of a mighty group of health nuts.
The planning ahead of meals is a main tip of weight loss coaches, food bloggers, and nutritionists.
Indeed, meal prepping’s popularity has exploded on social media. On Instagram alone there are 5.5 million photos tagged #mealprep and 1.1 million tagged #foodprep.
While perfectly portioned-out food for seven days does make for the perfect #foodporn snapshot, meal preppers are onto an idea that — at least in concept — is good for your diet, according to research.
People who spend more time preparing meals are more likely to have healthier diets, according to a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
They eat more fresh fruits and vegetables.
They also eat at fast food restaurants only half as often as people who only spend less than an hour each day prepping and cooking their meals.
In addition, they spend less money on food.
More recently, a 2017 study of 40,000 adults in France found that people who meal prepped at least a few days at a time were less likely to be overweight and stuck more closely to nutritional guidelines.
The survey also found that meal prepping led to more food variety over the week.
Portion control is one key way food prepping helps people maintain a healthy weight or lose a few pounds.
A review of several studies around the role of portion control in weight management showed that eating the appropriate amount of food is directly linked.
One component of portion control that researchers stress is choosing the right portions of water-rich foods, like fruits and vegetables, and eating less energy-dense foods — like most fast foods and candy.
If you prep your food, it’s easier to not only eat the right amount, but to avoid foods that are bad for you but oh-so-tempting.
Food containers contain hazards
However, if you’re portioning food out into plastic containers, all of that healthy preparation could actually create a new barrier to staying trim.
Dr. Aly Cohen, a rheumatologist, as well as an integrative medicine and environmental health specialist who is on staff at the CentraState Medical Center, explained.
“An effective diet is not just about healthy eating, managing sugar and carbohydrates, and exercise,” she told Healthline. “Reducing chemical exposure is also key because many of these chemicals can disrupt normal hormone function, impede weight loss, and even cause weight gain. Just because chemicals may not have an obvious effect, like causing a rash, doesn't mean they aren’t tinkering with your body.”
Whipping up a big batch of healthy chili, scooping it out into several plastic containers, and quickly reheating it in the microwave come mealtime is one example of how a healthy meal prep turns into several dinners brimming with the harmful hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA).
BPA is found in polycarbonate plastic (plastic #7) and canned food linings, as well as many other things that we touch every day — including our smartphones.
“Most human exposure to BPA is through ingestion from canned products, but BPA can also be absorbed by touching paper that uses BPA to seal ink onto its surface [e.g., receipts, airplane and parking tickets, currency] and then touching your hands to your lips. BPA can also be absorbed in smaller amounts through the skin,” Cohen said.
Cohen noted that BPA is pervasive — 8 billion pounds of BPA are made every year — since it’s one of the cheapest ways to make packaging.
BPA and — if your plastic container is marked “BPA-free” — similar, sometimes more harmful chemicals are lurking in your plastic food storage set of containers.
Heating up plastic containers by putting hot food in them or microwaving them can draw out BPA — right into your food.
How BPA affects the body
BPA was first discovered in 1891 and then rediscovered in 1936, according to Cohen.
“It was used as an estrogen replacement drug for women, and it was also used to fatten poultry and cattle. In the 1940s it was discovered that linking the molecules together created a hard, clear, glass-like plastic,” she said.
BPA can confuse the endocrine system, which regulates hormones, by mimicking estrogen.
We’re regularly ingesting BPA, and therefore continually disrupting the messages that help our bodies function properly. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 90 percentof people have detectable levels of BPA in their systems.
To date, nearly 100 studies have been published tying BPA to various health problems, from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to infertility, according to the Endocrine Society and IPEN's Introduction to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals.
Some other effects of too much BPA exposure are directly contrary to weight loss and healthy eating goals.
BPA may be wrecking your diet
BPA passes through a person’s system fairly quickly, but detoxifying still isn’t easy.
“Despite the fact that BPA has a short half-life of six hours, which means an exposure will wash out over a day or so, people continue to have high blood levels,” Cohen noted.
“There are two problems with BPA,” added Laura Vandenberg, PhD, a spokesperson for the Endocrine Society, and an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “One is that we are constantly exposed in our environment, so the levels never really seem to drop. Even in people that have been fasting, metabolite levels in urine are still detected. The second problem is that, if exposures occur during a vulnerable period of development, like fetal development, the effects can be permanent — even if exposures cease.”
For adult meal-planning fanatics, constant re-exposure to BPA may mean that meal prepping is actually sabotaging your diet.
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